While waiting for a bus at Kings Cross. This was new to me (maybe I have a sheltered life) but its graphic ooziness is certainly effective.

Bizarrely a few minutes later James from the 09 series of The Apprentice walked past. Of course James was notable mainly for his willingness to explore the upper tributaries of the English language, so I couldn’t help but wonder if there was some connection.

But we perhaps should be careful what we wish for. I remember I was once on a night train from Bucharest to Sofia (not recommended) where gradually and surreally all by fellow passengers revealed themselves to be fluent Esperanto speakers.

In the sleepless early hours this seemed odd beyond reckoning. I had never in my life met a single Esperanto speaker and here I was surrounded by them. Esperanto speakers of various ages, sexes and nationalities all on a random Romanian train. My mind boggled as I searched desperately but fruitlessly for an explanation. Eventually the train ground to a halt in the middle of nowhere and they all disappeared.

When I woke up the next morning I wondered if it had all been a dream? Not at all explained one of the few passengers who remained, apparently the world Esperanto convention was being held in some small Bulgarian town that year and this had been the only train that stopped at it.

Bathos.

So while it might be nice to think that James and jellied eel man were fellow delegates at some inventive cursing conference, the reality is sure to disappoint. Some things best left alone!

This is my favourite local government story for a long, long time.

Cricklewood is making a bid for freedom with a campaign to move the area from the borough of Barnet to neighbouring Camden.

Apparently the Save Cricklewood Campaign is petitioning the Boundary Commission to make this happen. Now, I know there’s a lot of serious issues at play here, none of which I’m qualified to talk about. I don’t know the ins and outs of the new Brent Cross Cricklewood Development, I don’t know how many residents actually support this campaign and I certainly don’t understand the grave complexities that I’m sure attend any boundary change.

But nonetheless, I love this.

Partly because as a proud Camden resident it gives me a warm glow (give us your huddled masses etc), but mainly because I think it gives us a preview, albeit a slightly crazy one, of how things might be if localism really worked.

People would engage with the performance of their council and compare it with the performance of others, people would engage in debate and seek to influence how their council worked. People would not just accept what they were given but would work to improve it. They would vote with their feet, their wallets and their ballot papers.

The net effect of this would not be, as many have argued, a random post code lottery, but a universal driving up of standards.

So I for one am fully behind this campaign. People of Cricklewood, we salute you!!

I did wonder though what the film tells us about our attitude towards talent and creativity. The clue is in the title Coco Avant Chanel. But Coco’s claim on our attention is not the bit of her life before Chanel – it is Chanel. So in some ways the whole concept of the film seems perverse. But of course it’s part of oour contemporary urge to find meaning through biography.

Art we believe must be explicable through life. If we can understand Coco’s impoverished upbringing, her complex love life, her desperation to be loved and her fear of it. If we can understand those things, then surely we can understand her art.

I wonder. I wouldn’t deny for one moment that an artist’s life experience is part of what makes them and their art what they are. But how big a part? The problem is there is never a counterfactual. If Coco had had a secure, stable upbringing would she never have made the same clothes? Any clothes? Possibly not, but we cannot know for sure…

Locating the art so firmly in the life is part of our need to explain it, to pin it down and as such it inevitably simplifies it and impoverishes our understanding more than it enriches it.